VETERAN PRODUCER Jay Joyce has pushed the faders for The Wallflowers, Emmylou Harris, Patty
Griffin, and Little Big Town. And he’s played guitar with John Hiatt, Iggy Pop, Brendan Benson,
and Radney Foster. Recently opening St. Charles Studio in Nashville, his first productions
included Cage the Elephant’s Melophobia, Eric Church, and baby-band Sleeper Agent’s third
album, About Last Night (RCA/Mom+Pop). Joyce doesn’t pull punches as he shares insights on
his production philosophy, and later, digs into the Sleeper Agent sessions.

“How can I put this without putting people
down?” Joyce muses. “I never think about
sales, marketing, what people are listening
to or not, whether something works or not.
I never have. If the music’s good and you’re
having fun and you are passionately moved by
it, generally the musicians know more than
the business people about what’s working and
what isn’t.”

“The communication and the feelings are
way more important than the sonics,” Joyce
adds, denying 50 years of recording technology
advances in a single sentence. “I don’t think
somebody is going to say, ‘I don’t really believe
that vocal, it’s not very good. But man, it’s
really well recorded.’ Who cares?”

About Last Night was recorded by Joyce and
engineer Jason Hall, assisted by Matt Wheeler,
and mixed by Mark Needham at the Ballroom
Studio in Los Angeles. Additional tracks
were produced and engineered and mixed
by Shinedown bassist Eric Bass at his Ocean
Industries studio in Charleston, SC, and by
Jeremy Ferguson at Battle Tapes Recording in
Nashville. The album was mixed by Joyce at St.
Charles and mastered by Chris Athens at Chris
Athens Masters, Austin, TX.

Sleeper Agent strode into Jay Joyce’s new
lair this past summer, hot off their reasonably
successful sophomore record, Celebrasion.
“[Celebrasion] was recorded innocently, just
the band and me making music for ourselves,”
Joyce says. “This time it involved more people
in the mix: managers, record companies—
people with opinions. The band’s music had
a girl/guy thing; it was unique and really
clever. This time, the process was different.
Everything began with a live take, cut to click,
then entire sections were moved around, like a
collage process. I don’t do that often anymore;
I am generally a live producer.”

“You play whatever is getting you off at the
time,” lead guitarist Josh Martin insists. “This
was definitely an evolution. It’s more focused on our lead singer Alex and her voice and
writing to her.”

For Joyce and Hall, it meant starting each
song anew, creating fresh sonic treatments,
from adding samples to live drums to
minutely adjusting in-studio configurations to
starting songs from scratch. Joyce and Hall
don’t set up mics and leave it at that—every
song gets a fresh interpretation. “It’s a lot
more work, and you have no idea if it will
work until you’ve put 12 hours into the song,”
Joyce says. “There were songs where I told
the band, ‘You don’t want to hear this, but this
song sucks. We have to do it again.’ It would
have been easier to do one take. But in saying
that, sonically and instrumentation wise, I
didn’t feel that every song demanded a new
palette. Our keyboard sound repertoire was
fairly small. But this record was definitely a
new sound for the band.”

The band worked out song details in pre-St.
Charles demos recorded at keyboard player
Scott Gardener’s Bowling Green home. “We
used Scott’s Logic system to record 30 to 40
songs while waiting to get into the bigger
studio,” Martin explains. “We experimented a
lot. On ‘Impressed,’ there’s a delay that sweeps
through the song. It disrupts the texture of
the tune but adds an emotional build before
the chorus. We used two delays at once; the
Line 6 DL4 and a Digitech Expression pedal.
And ‘Be Brave’ has these almost robotic effects.
It’s a couple synths and guitars running
through a box that chops up sound like a
distorted vocoder. We used some plug-in and
an Electro Harmonix Voice Box.”

“I used Logic and a PreSonus FireStudio
with FireWire,” Gardener says, “just enough
inputs to mic vocals, bass, guitars, and drums,
then direct with keyboards. I used SM57s
on amps, just trying to capture that first
impression of us playing together to decide
whether we needed to try a different style.
And mostly entry-level CAD microphones and
some cheaper Beringer condenser mics. Blue
Microphones sent us a Yeti, which we used on
vocals. It’s real hot, but we liked it a lot.”

Working at a brand-new studio built within
the skeleton of 1920s-era Baptist church, Hall
saw About Last Night—St. Charles’ first record
out of the gate—as a chance to experiment.
“For the first week, Sleeper Agent came in and
played a couple songs a day while we tuned
everything in,” he recalls. “The church is a
big, wide-open, single-room facility, including
the control room and the tracking space. We
experimented with drum placement and
allowing certain elements to bleed into the
room mics and the drum mics, trying to capture
the spirit of the building. There’s something
about that bleed; it makes the guitars sound
better and the drums sound cooler. Getting
that energy of the band playing together in
the same room as opposed to everything being
perfectly isolated or recording each instrument
individually was important.”

St. Charles’ secret weapon is an extremely
rare, late 1970s-era Sphere Eclipse C console.
While Joyce and Hall selectively used Neve
outboard mic pres, the bulk of the album
went through the Sphere Eclipse console and
internal mic preamps.

“We tracked everything we could through
the Sphere to give that particular color to as
many elements of the record as we could,”
Hall says, “to help create a vibe and a sound
that was unique. That’s the way records were
done forever; it’s only a more recent trend that
everybody uses these boutique preamps. But
the Eclipse console sounds so beautiful.

“There were only 50 Eclipse C Series made;
it was part of the Electrodyne/Quad-Eight
lineage,” Hall continues. “These consoles are
the end of that history. It’s got a similar sound
to a Quad-Eight console but with these really
amazing 900 Series EQs, which are graphic
EQs on each channel. A lot of mastering
engineers use them. We had 20 of those
available for all the different instruments; they
make beautiful-sounding EQs.

Hall and Joyce created their own echo
chambers in the church’s large basement, filling
its various small rooms with microphones
and amps, “trying to capture acoustic spaces
that were in different locations,” says Hall. In the main live room, they placed drums in the
former vestibule and the control room—where
else?—on the altar. But they said no to isolation
booths, even for vocals.

“We don’t isolate every person in the band,”
Hall continues. “We want the members to have
an open dialog. So they’re playing together,
and we’re right next to them. We motion at
them and we are all part of a group dynamic
and dialog.”

St. Charles has the sonic benefit of the
church’s vaulted ceilings and the beauty of
its stained glass amber windows. “It’s a very
beautiful, musical-sounding room,” says Hall.
“Very natural, not reverberant, all wood floors.
Everything is on wheels, so we can move gear
around at will, make it configurable depending
on the client’s sonic goals. We move drums
around, move guitar amps around, move
baffles around, it’s completely configurable
depending on the band’s instrumentation.
Sleeper Agent was our first baby out of the new
studio and we did a lot of experimenting to
figure out this new space. I feel like the spirit
of exploration is prevalent on that record.”

For drummer Justin Wilson, Hall ran
everything through the Sphere console, using
LA2As and 1176s for compression for drums
and vocals, and other instruments as well.
Drums were recorded both minimally and
maximally, again, depending on the song. “For
drums, we relied on SM57s and Royer 121 as
overheads and maybe a Neumann SM69 as a
stereo room mic,” he says. “You have to use
close mics to get all the impact drum stuff,
but generally we try to get a really cool room
sound, and blend that in with the close mics.
We also discovered you can’t always just place
the drums anywhere in a wide-open room. You
have to create barriers for the sound to stop at
in order to really get a tight, energetic drum
sound. We used band shell barriers like you
might see at an auditorium for an orchestra.
They have a slanted top; using those in the
room really helped us define certain spaces
where it was necessary.

“On some songs, we might do four mics or
even fewer on the drums and blend them down
to one track on an Altec mixer, all the way up
to 12 mics on a drum kit in the main room,
says Hall. “It changed depending on the song.
Also, we don’t get drum sounds for a whole
record, then move on to the next element. For
each song, we discuss certain treatments then
approach each element from that directive.
Sometimes we’ll track drums very minimalist
then build them up later, or we might get a
huge drum sound while cutting the band live
together.”

So Hall and Joyce followed the “studio
as instrument” approach as practiced by
everyone from Brian Wilson and Phil Spector
to Amon Duul II and Teo Macero-era Miles
Davis? “Absolutely! That is one of Jay’s
staples,” says Hall. “And we are not just cutting
a bunch of tracks then fixing them in the mix.
We are going for things from the beginning.
We want it to sound like the finished record
while we are tracking it. We will add effects to
drums while recording, or treat vocals while
recording to try and impart some kind of vibe
while we are cutting it.”

Hall and Joyce used UAD plug-ins,
Waves compressors and SoundToys bundles.
Keyboards and bass were recorded direct
and also fed to amplifiers, using basement
chambers to isolate amps. “Sometimes you can have an amp that will be too loud for the room,
so we put it in a room downstairs,” Hall says.
“We even ran vocals through a separate P.A.
upstairs to excite the room mics.”

EMT plates and Fender and AKG spring
reverbs were used on everything; guitars also
received the vintage treatment. The biggest
recording challenge, beyond tracking a new
band in a new studio, was chasing electrical
circuits and signals: Where’s the damn hum
coming from?

“Going to a new room where you don’t
know what you’ll get, you have to think on
your feet and make adjustments on the fly,
says Hall. “And there’s the typical electronic
explorations, sorting out hums and noises in
the line, working with the power scheme of
this old church.”

Another challenge for Joyce was tracking
the dual lead vocals of Kandel and Smith.
Where on their second album Sleeper Agent
sounded like a typical male-fronted alt rock
band, Alex’s sharp female attack added a new
element to the band’s sound. Retaining the
freshness of the male/female contrast while
letting Kandel fully come into her own as a
singer was key.

“Alex and Tony have been singing
together a while, so they have a thing,” says
Joyce. “Tony writes the lyrics with all these
really clever layers. His vocal cadence and
the rhythms of his vocals are pretty complex
if you break them down. This is the only
band Alex has ever sung with, straight out
of high school. She learned how to sing by
hearing Tony’s songs. Tony writes for her,
but she doesn’t sing like him. His singing is
sly and weird. I had to get clarity from them,
particularly with the mandate to make it
more commercial. So we wanted to make
the vocals very big and in your face and
important. We recorded them live together
to make sure the parts were working. The
songs are heavier on this record than the
last. So we got Alex on her own a few times
and separated them occasionally.”

Smith sang through an EV RE15, (“the old
Beatles mic,” says Joyce) while Kandel tracked
through a Shure SM7. “We wanted control
over the best take,” Joyce explains. “If they are
both singing, I might have to settle because
they are bleeding into each other’s mics. I want
them close together to get that energy. But
separating them gave me more control over the
vocals. If I can use take two from Alex and take
three from Tony, you won’t hear the bleed.”

“I like the sound of a vocal in a live room,”
Joyce says. “If I am going for a super dry vocal,
I will isolate a singer, but I don’t do that as
a given. That should be a desired effect, but
that’s not how people sound. If they are singing
and they’re comfortable, I put a mic in front
of them and they sing it right where they are
so they’re not rethinking it. The less they are
thinking about singing the better—then they’re
just singing the song. The best way to get
somebody doing what they do best is just doing
it and not having them thinking about it. And
that works better in an open space.”